Last semester I spent a lot of time on conceptualizing the whole installation as such. I had a very wholistic approach, where the sound was clearly a main attraction, but all the other details seemed just as important. And during developing this concept and contemplating what I want it to convey (and if I want it to convey something), I also came up with the name “The Emotional Space”. As a quick recap – I framed my concept in one sentence like follows: “The Emotional Space describes a room that reacts at least as much to the mood of its visitors as the other way around”. While this might not be very easy to understand immediately, it does transport my artistic approach quite well: I wanted to create an installation that not only emphasizes, but downright lives through the individual ways a visitor might want to experience it.
When this semester arrived, a lot of feedback and contemplation followed, and I realized that I am not fully standing behind the concept anymore. I got confused comments about the word “emotional” in the title and started questioning how appropriate it is – do I dare to claim to change people’s emotions with my installation? How fitting is such a term to describe a room? With those doubts in mind, my whole concept slightly lost its grounding and I had to clear my mind and define what I really wanted to spend my time with during this project. But then again, being a sound design student, the choice was clear: I wanted to work with sound.
When I stopped thinking of the project as an installation, I quickly realized that what I wanted to achieve is easy to describe: I would like to create an explorative, interactive composition. And funnily, that description does not contradict anything I worked out last semester– it is rather a slightly more focused phrasing. While knowing what exactly I want to work on gave the project its direction back, I was still not happy with the word “emotional” in the title. But over the course of this semester, I enjoyed to “The Fluid Space”, which has a little more of a neutral standing and might not create too many expectations in its visitors. Some might disregard those topics as superficial, but I have a strong sense that this process was very crucial for me to know what exactly I am working towards. What I am now striving to create, is rather a format than an installation. Of course, the presentation of this format will still be embedded into an installation that may still follow the wholistic values I had in mind last semester. However, I want to further discover the possibilities of the format of explorative, interactive compositions, aided by the sensors I have in place. My modular approach should make it possible to get entirely different kinds of composition – also in their arrangement and interactivity – while working with the same core logic.
